BC Studies no. 192 Winter 2016/17

BC Studies no. 192 Winter 2016/17

In recent decades, scholars on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border and in Japan have contributed to the development of a rich and growing body of literature that addresses the historical experience of Japanese immigrants and their descendants in North America. This special issue of BC Studies will take stock of what this has meant for Nikkei history in British Columbia and ask how approaches developed in other regional or disciplinary contexts might be applied to further enhance our understanding of the Nikkei experience in British Columbia.

Guest edited by Andrea Geiger, the issue features an excerpt from Joy Kogawa’s Gently to Nagasaki, articles by Greg Robinson, Janice Matsumura, Daniel Lachapelle Lemire and Patricia Roy, and a photo essay by Robert Muckle.

This Space Here

Excerpt from Within the Barbed Wire Fence: A Japanese Man’s Account of His Internment in Canada

Andrea Geiger is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University. Her first book, Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885-1928 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), was awarded the 2011 Theodore Saloutos Book Award (Immigration and Ethnic History Society) and the 2013 Association of Asian American Studies History Book Award. Her current book project examines historical encounters between early Japanese immigrants and Indigenous people in the North American West.

Joy Kogawa was born in Vancouver, BC. Her best-known work is a novel, Obasan. She has recently published a memoir, Gently to Nagasaki, by Caitlin Press.

Daniel Lachapelle Lemire is putting the final touches to his PhD thesis on the reimagination of the Japanese Canadians’ collective identity. He is currently working in parallel on a book project – a translation of essays written by Japanese Canadian children for their language school’s newsletter before the Second World War. He dedicates a sizeable pro- portion of his spare time to the practice and teaching of two Japanese martial arts, iaido and kendo.

Janice Matsumura is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada. The focus of her research has been the Asia-Pacific War (1931–45), including the relationship between state propaganda and medical policies.

Robert (Bob) Muckle has been teaching, practising, and writing about archaeology and anthropology in BC since the 1980s. He is a faculty member of the Department of Anthropology at Capilano University in North Vancouver.

Greg Robinson is a Professor of History at l’Université du Québec à Montréal, and a researcher at the Center for United States Studies of the Chaire Raoul-Dandurand. His book, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (Columbia University Press, 2009), won the 2009 History book prize of the Association for Asian American Studies, and his book After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics (University of California Press, 2012), won the Caroline Bancroft History Prize in Western U.S. History. His most recent book, The Great Unknown: Japanese American Sketches (University Press of Colorado, 2016), offers an alternative history of Japanese Americans. Professor Robinson is the editor of Pacific Citizens: Larry and Guyo Tajiri and Japanese American Journalism in the World War II Era (University of Illinois Press, 2012), and co-editor of Miné Okubo: Following Her Own Road, on the groundbreaking nisei artist and writer.

Patricia E. Roy, a Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Victoria, has contributed a number of articles to BC Studies over the years. She has written extensively on the Chinese and Japanese in British Columbia, but her most recent book is Boundless Optimism: Richard McBride’s British Columbia (ubc Press, 2012).